Preivious posts about leopards and Longonot brought to mind a trip Troy Nuenberg and I made up Longonot a couple years after we had graduated from RVA. We climbed Longonot in the afternoon with the intention of sleeping up near the rim and rappelling into the crater the next day in search of a lengendary crashed airplane that had supposedly never been found. On the way up near the base of the mountain we saw many large cat tracks in the dust. A ranger told us that we were the only people on the mountain that day and warned us to look out for a leopard that was lurking around. We assumed that since we were going to be sleeping up near the top that we would be out of danger since there were few animals and no trees near the rim. As night fell we set up camp on an indentation in the slope just below the top of the trail. After dark we realized that neither of us had brought a flashlight and we would just have to wait out the night in pitch black. About an hour later a storm started moving down the valley. The lightning was pretty intense in the black night and we assumed that it was going to be a pretty bad storm up on Longonot and that we had better get down if we could.

I fired up my propane campstove that I had in my pack and we tumbled and down climbed the mountain by its meager light. We were unable to see more than four or five feet in front of us because the light was so weak. Luckily the trail followed a lot of erosion and we managed to find our way through all the gullies to the trail at the bottom. All through the trip down the cat tracks we had seen were very much on the forefront of our minds. By the time we reached the bottom we were both exhausted and scared stiff. We were also lost.

We spent some time searching for the railroad tracks that lead back to Kijabe but couldn't find them and finally threw out our sleeping bags in a field and fell asleep. The storm somehow passed over without getting us too wet. Later that night we woke to a very loud noise and bright lights shining right on us. We had missed the tracks by only 30 or 40 feet and were sleeping at a curve in the tracks. We both sat up straight to see a train coming straight at us before it turned at the last moment and headed off down the valley. After all that, the chai and egg on toast the next morning at the local truck stop were the best food I think I have ever had.

Story index---Home